Green - part ii

Eventually the court decided upon a cash fine punishment for my crime, and my visits to Paisley came to an end. It is hard to understate how much of a relief this was. Paisley Sheriff Court was without doubt the jakiest place I’d ever spent any serious amount of time (and I had been to my fair share of parties in squats). I try not to be too snobby, and I’m a good socialist of course, but it was hard to go there and not feel a profound sense that I didn’t belong. The people there wore unwashed tracksuits and had yellow skin; they spoke in a harsh, high-pitched vernacular that pranged about in my head like a sarcastic pinball machine; it caused me to sweat in angst and fear. I felt I had much more in common with the Sheriff, who I held to be firm but fair. Discharged, I agreed to pay back my debt to society at a rate of £5 per month.

By this time I had left university—a necessary consequence of the parrot incident. I had missed my Monday tutorial three times consecutively, having never attended it. It was a condition of the course that no more than three could be missed. Nonetheless, I decided to go to Optimo for the halloween party, dressed as a pirate. I recall bumping into another pirate on the dancefloor; he was a pirate in the Captain Hook sense. I guess I was more of a lowly buccaneer. His parrot was resplendent; green and yellow and red, resolutely paradisiacal. Mine was a football sock stuffed with other socks, with Jim Davidson’s face sellotaped to the top. The good captain stood me a line of gak, then, like ships in the night, I said ‘cheers’ and scuttled off to the dancefloor.

Later on, in the melee outside, I saw a familiar face. I couldn’t place it at first, but eventually realized that it was Sean McGonagall, who had come dressed as a jakey. I hadn’t seen him since I was fifteen; he had been the first in my year to drop out of school. Since then he had got a job in a call centre, left home, and had become obsessed with lizard people and 9/11 conspiracy theories. I ended up going back to his flat (a dinge in Govanhill with a brown carpet in the bathroom) along with several other strangers. Sean sorted each guest out with a ginormous glazed green ecstasy tablet, and then taught us the new trick. Essentially, the key was to put one’s head between one’s legs, then breathe deeply and quickly to the point of hyperventilation. Once the desired condition was achieved, one had to stand up suddenly, and then a friend would strangle one until one passed out. It was a lot of effort, but the buzz was quite unachievable via any other method. I was proud to be a link in the chain of what became a winter craze in the afterparties of Glasgow that year.

Anyway, the result of the above was that by the time I got to my tutorial I was so wasted I could barely stay awake, had no idea what the tutorial was about, and my get-up featured a lacklustre pseudo-parrot that flopped across my breast.

It was clearly time to move on. It was time to get a job.

*

I was disappointed to be turned down for a temp placement at the police call centre due to my criminal record, but I recovered from the setback and eventually found a job stuffing envelopes for a stock broker. Every morning I arrived at a grand mansion on West George Street in the financial district to the west of the city centre. I walked through a doorway sized for a giant, though a reception bedecked in gold and marble, scanned my temporary security pass at the lift and was taken down to a windowless basement. I trudged down a threadbare grey carpet to a small room with a buzzing and flickering fluorescent light, and then I cried for fifteen minutes or so before booting up my computer.

I had two tasks; the first was to run the mail merge to run off cheques for clients. The second was to get these into envelopes. At various points in the day, a chubby gothic girl called Jennifer would come and take the envelopes away. I do not know what she did with them. She was the only person I spoke to in my working day. It appeared to be understood around the office that there was no position lower than that of temporary envelope stuffer. Whenever I made eye contact with someone, such as if I took a sojourn into the canteen to fetch a cup of ersatz coffee (22p a go), they would pull a face of the utmost distaste. I felt incredible shame.

‘Jenny,’ I said one day, ‘why are you the only one who talks to me.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘Tom Monaghan told everyone that he heard you masturbating in the toilet cubicle one morning. But I don’t believe him.’

Obviously, I called him a dick and a liar. I think I had just been cutting and snorting a bit speed, but I don’t want to rule anything out.

‘He’s a pompous tennis-club cunt. He calls me Marilyn Manson and thinks its hilarious.’

‘We’ve got to stick together, Jenny.’

As well as my computer and cheque printer, I also had an envelope stuffing machine at my disposal. The machine was a glorious thing to behold; a haphazard mess of rods and pulleys, whirrers and wheelies. As a whole it looked like a scaled version of a rollercoaster. It sucked letters in from a frontal basket, and folded them via some secret mechanism deep within its gut. Simultaneously, a windowed envelope would be pinged from a pile, pinched open and packed. The stuffed package was then whisked down a rolley tube, flipped around for no reason I could establish, then a wet flicker (which supped continuously from a high-held flask of water, fed via a force I have since established to be the gravitational pull of Earth) licked the gum before a rubber presser pressed it and then dropped the wrapped missive in a rear basket. It was quite a contraption, and a wonder to witness, when it was working. Of course, it only rarely worked as described. It was awash with nooks and abundant in crannies, any of which were ampleformed to snatch and twist and destroy a paper message. Even if the letter successfully navigated its way through the epistolary assault course, the wet flicker was not just incompetent but also fundamentally workshy. It seemed to suffer from a fear of water—often detaching itself and jumping to the floor rather than allowing itself to become moistened. If I was feeling regimental and really forced the issue, it would suck up its drink and sob away, refusing to swing itself across the gue trails, but creating puddles in awkward places to mop (and why oh why was it set atop a carpet?)

So that is why I spent basically eight hours a day licking gum arabic. I can still taste it now, and I mean this literally. By the end of the day I could barely open my mouth as it was sealed shut with adhesive.

On my CV I describe this job as: Communications Director.

*

I was finally earning more than pocket money though, and my lifestyle was basically incompatible with my living arrangements, so I took the plunge and left the family home. I took an illegal sublease of a council flat, a one bedroom tenement in Whiteinch about a mile further west than the fashionable west end, just beyond the humpback bridge.

My ‘landlord’ was a bald man named Malcolm, who worked as a street cleaner. He would have made a decent second income as a drug dealer if it wasn’t for his habit and his ineptitude. I can’t imagine his income from his property rental business was significant.

‘Ben Allan,’ I said, and offered my hand.

‘Malcolm,’ he said, ‘nice to meet you Ben.’

‘It’s Ben Allan actually.’

He looked quizzically at me.

‘Aye, I know—you just said.’

‘Okay, yeah, I wasn’t sure you heard.’

‘So this is the flat. As you can see, it’s in top nick. All mod cons. Appliances. Etcetera.’

‘Yes.’

‘Rent’s £400 a month. Just post it through my letter box by the 1st. Cash only.’

‘Fine.’

‘You’ll take it then?’

‘Aye, sure.’

He gave me the keys and fucked off. That was that.

The flat came equipped with a bed of an unusual size, somewhere between single and double in width, but overlong. Fortunately, there was already a, perhaps custom made, duvet and bedsheets there when I moved in. The bed took up about half of the space in the bedroom. I also had an old stove with hotplates on the top, and central heating that was maybe faulty or perhaps I just didn’t understand how it worked. The kitchen was in the living room, which also had an ancient couch which caused instant and irreversible back ailments if used for sitting on, a deckchair / chaise longue hybrid that creaked ominously, and a square rear-projection television that weighed about a hundred pounds. The sanitaryware was plastic and was in a sickly mint green. All the walls were painted magnolia, and the floors were the cheapest wood-effect linoleum imaginable. The windows were single pane, and white paint flaked off the frame every time they were opened or closed. On the coldest nights, I was to discover, they opted not to close at all.

Despite the above, I was rarely without company. At the weekends the place was a riot. There was usually still people sleeping on the floor when I got back from work on a Monday evening. The surrounding flats formed a penumbra of antipathy around me. I feared for my life when in the close.

*

Could fit something else in here?

*

Weed, I had realized after the incident at Lisa’s, didn’t always agree with me. I had since become hyper-aware of the vaguest nascent sense of paranoia; had been fearful of the first toke from any untested plant. Every time a quarter ran out, I thought: that’s it. Too hairy.

Mondays were the problem. After Optimo I’d sleep two hours if I was lucky, rarely in my bed, then spend eight hours hiding in my room with my machine, desperately trying to make it work because I’d ran out of saliva at about three in the morning and it wasn’t coming back. I always intended to bring in double-sided sellotape, but it inevitably slipped my mind in the Monday rush. Eventually I’d give up on the machine and sit with a water bottle, wetting first my tongue and then the envelope. By the end of the day, I was always convinced that I needed a jeef to get my appetite back, and to get me to sleep.

I had a guy, Jie Pee—I can’t even recall how I met him, who had a reliable supply. All you had to do was text and he was right back to you: come on over. So it was that one Monday I gave him that text and got that response.

To Ibrox I went, to his high rise, to his shitty little flat that he’d inherited from his granny. It still had all the original granny furniture: patterned sofas and wallpaper, an acid green carpet, photos of unknown children framed on the walls. The only things he had added were various overpowering aromas, and bongs and ashtrays all over the place.

He always wore sports clothing, always wore a baseball cap. He had skin the texture of a Mitre Mouldmaster football and coloured in various reds and often greens and blacks depending on how wasted he was or had been. In short, he was disgusting. But, as I always did, after the purchase I kicked back on the sofa next to some other visitor (a boy of maybe fifteen who didn’t say a word the whole time I was there; just stared coldly ahead, smoking anything that was shifted to him) and rolled a joint to pass; it just seemed the polite thing to do.

I don’t know if it was whatever I had been taking the night before, or if this weed was particularly lethal or what, but I was instantly stoned. I kept feeling like the room was spinning up away from me, and I kept trying to follow its movement with my eyes. I passed the jeef sharpish, and, looking for something to say, anything, hoping to appear less wasted, I must have blurted out:

‘Why don’t you guys come round to mine on Friday, I’m having a wee party.’

So the next Friday I was sitting on the chaise longue, lazily thumbing my way through a Kafka short story that I’d been reading for about three months, when the buzzer went. I considered dinghying it, but on balance decided to unplug the TV. I then visualized a manner by which it could be hidden before a licence inspector made his way up to the second storey (probably overestimating my strength by a factor of several) and I cautiously hello’d the talker.

‘Alright Benny, it’s Jie Pee, let us intae the party.’

At first my main panic was that there was no party. Fortunately, Jie Pee brought his own. Half the tower he lived in poured through my door, into my measly hovel.  It was fine at first. Nobody seemed remotely embarrassed by the lack of a put-on spread. Not an iota of offence was taken, initially, at the fact I had no bevvy in. I was happily ‘loaned’ swallies of cider by several of my guests. There was even a brief period that I recall being quite wasted and having a good time; I had just came up on an acrid snort of MDMA and was firing into some lassie who went by Amber, and I had the groinal rush and the seismic breathing of a lothario, even though there was no privacy to be had in my sock in Whiteinch and in reality I kind of knew that her boyfriend was the guy with the crew cut in the crimson tracksuit who was throwing my Kafka book out of the window, so in short the only place I was likely to get with this girl was A&E, but still, this would be the positive that I picked out.

It was shortly after this that whatever it was that happened happened. Thirty guys and girls in an irregular bedsit; everyone up to their eyeballs in E (Adam, sweeties, empathy, ecstasy; the love drug) and like a touched button it turned into Beirut.

I don’t know who the button was, it could have been me even, or how they were pressed, but shit started getting smashed up. The chaise longue was torn and twisted, someone put the toaster through the telly, all the cups and glasses were smashed, the crockery got panned, at least one person pissed in my wardrobe, and sporadic fighting broke out.

After coming round from a blow to the head in the bathroom I called the police on my own party. Fortunately, they were already there.

This was the sort of thing that antagonized my neighbours.

*

Josh had had a fight with is bird or something so he was round at mine, or maybe he was just round at mine because Wednesdays were fair game for drinking back then, and we were talking about whether The Sopranos was good or not. In my opinion it was very good. I thought gangsterism was the natural form of capitalism, and The Sopranos could hence be understood as a revolutionary work, a la the board game Monopoly. Josh thought that Tony Soprano was a disgusting fat psychopath. I didn’t really see how this was a criticism of the show. He must have been getting bored of this back and forth as he said, à propos of nothing,

‘I think that Natasha bird like you.’

Obviously I claimed not to doubt this, but I hadn’t even considered the possibility before. She was just someone who was around, who partied. Fit though, I decided. Single, I realized.

Then the buzzer went; it had sounded an ominous note since Jie Pee’s visit, so I decided to ignore it. We heard the footsteps ascending the close. The key in the door. Then Malcolm stuck his baldy dome into the room.

I was up to date with the rent so I wasn’t worried, even though he seemed unusually highly strung.

‘What the fuck happened here,’ he said, looking around the flat, which was, several weeks on, still a bombsite.

‘Nothing to worry about, man. Telly’s done in.’

‘Aye… here listen. I need you to hold some shit for me.’

I could see his eyes darting around; he clearly wasn’t prepared for this. But he must have been desperate to come in the first place; if there was a backup plan, he would have went there first. He eyed the chaise longue, which was piled in parts in the corner. There was blood on the wall by the toilet door. He looked as though he had suspended disbelief in his own actions as as he passed me a battered Reebok holdall.

‘Just keep an eye on it. Bit of heat.’

I could barely believe it either. There was about a kilo of eccies and another of speed in the bag. I mean, I had bought from him a few times, so I guess we’d built up a bit of trust. You know, actually, in a way it was one of those life moments that are, sort of, affirming. I’d always thought, basically, that I was a bad bet. I was more or less incapable of keeping my word, because I promised too much when I was wasted and when I wasn’t wasted I was hungover and, fuck, who ever did anything? And who gets wasted and then goes and does all the shit they said they ever were going to do, like, leaves the party to do that?

But here was some guy and I thought: that’s nice that he trusts me. I’ll step up to this.

But, I was putting myself in for a potential twenty to life by sitting on all this heat, so it was only fair that Josh and I got a wee go on it once Malcolm had fucked back off.